What does "filmlike" mean?

[raydm6]

I wish there was a way to emulate film on printing paper surfaces. Maybe with AI?

Stable Diffusion generated image using Panatomic-X and Agfa Brovira as part of prompt:

 

[RichC]

D

I wish there was a way to emulate film on printing paper surfaces. Maybe with AI?

But there's no need to emulate because you can use traditional chromogenic silver halide (i.e. "C type") paper and chemicals with digital images projected by laser. I guess the range of paper today is mire limited, but still...

In fact, C type prints are cheaper than inkjet prints from labs.

All my exhibition prints are C types because I think they look better: the image sits in silver prints rather than on the surface as with inkjet prints, so it's kind of like looking into the picture instead of at a surface that abruptly stops - if that makes sense!

 

[raydm6]

I have had some really nice results with Baryta ink-jet prints. I have some examples here on RFF.

My First 5x7 Baryta Prints - Your Economical Printing Workflow?

I thought I’d try some baryta paper with my meager small home all-in-one printer. These are my first two prints out of the shoot and am pretty happy with the results. I didn’t use any ICC profiles as I didn’t see any for my machine and just made small adjustments in the print settings. I just...

rangefinderforum.com

 

[PaulDalex]

RichC,
your posting is comforting for me because I am not able to see a difference and this made me feel stupid, given all the hype about film look.
I can only see the difference between a beautiful and a ugly photo.
Certainly recent digital cameras have I believe passed the resolution of film. But aside from this the look the same for me.

 

[Pál_K]

...

The following images were taken about a year apart - one was shot with film, the other with digital.

View attachment 4825356
View attachment 4825357
Leica M6 vs. M10-P.
Can you tell me which image is film and which is digital?

The top one seems like film to me.

However, such comparisons are difficult because the film is being scanned - so we're still seeing two digital images. Likewise, printing a digital image to compare with a film print isn't quite right either.

 

[dbell]

Whenever I hear "film-like," I think "which film?" and "developed how?" Because it makes a lot of difference...

There wasn't just one "film look." People devoted considerable time and effort to figuring out how to produce THEIR look on film, just like we do now with digital. My goal isn't to make my pictures look like they were all shot with one particular lens, camera, recipe, etc; it's to make them all look like I made them.

Too often, I hear "film-like" used to describe washed out or weirdly-balanced colors, yucky optical artifacts, lots of rectilinear distortion, and questionable exposure. None of those were properties of film; they were defects that most of us usually tried to avoid 😛.

 

[x-ray]

A couple of people here nailed it.

First film has depth to the emulsion. When light strikes the emulsion it starts a chemical process that runs the depth of the emulsion. Digital on the other hand is an electrical response to light that occurs on the surface of the sensor.

The image captured on the surface of the sensor in effect has very high accutance. Film generally has lower accutance due to the depth of the emulsion and diffusion of light within the emulsion. If you place a knife edge on a sheet of film and expose to make a solid black on close examination you would see a gray area between black and white. Digital would show less or none at all or high accutance vs film.

I would have said distribution of tones at one time but with proper profiling I believe about any film curve can be replicated digitally.

Next as mentioned, the image on a C or R print of B&W print, wet process, has depth created by the chemical reaction within the emulsion. The image has a much greater physical depth vs digital. Digital prints are inks or pigments applied to the surface of a coating and lack that depth of a wet print. To my eye looking at two prints of the same image side by side it’s really easy to see the difference.

This isn’t to say digital can’t be done well or wet prints can’t be poorly done because there are a lot of really terrible wet prints and a lot of great digital prints.

Other than the two things mentioned a lot of it comes down to the skill of the printer both with wet and digital printing. And it comes down to how the digital photographer processes their raw file. A lot of digital folks overdo clarity, contrast, sharpening and saturation. IMO it’s the mark of a true amateur and the killer of digital imaging.

I used to go crazy looking at digital images and digital prints but now I look at them differently. They’re two totally different things like Ciba prints are different than dye transfer and different than type R and C. They’re just different and I now accept that and work hard at achieving the look of my images that I like.

I hate giving up color transparency film. I shot tens of thousands of sheets for catalogs and a few hundred thousand rolls and understand how to get what I want out of it but it’s just too expensive and difficult to get good processing. So I’m all digital for color and mostly film for B&W and as long as I have a freezer full of fil and paper that’s how it’ll stay.

 

[maddoc]

I will take a guess and say the first image is film.

My guess is the same, top image from the M6.

 

[peterm1]

It's like what that US Supreme Court Justice once said about porn "I cannot define it but I know it when I see it." 😆

I am sort of being serious when I state the above. I cannot really define "film like" off the top of my head. But I can say this, when I take a shot and post process it (which I pretty much always do) I will vaguely have in mind how I think it might look and quite often that is something which I would describe either as "film like" or in some cases "painterly". (It depends on the image - some are best if they look somewhat film like and others really demand going the "whole hog" and making more "painterly (i.e. think less sharp, a good amount of grain and blur and usually some color desaturation. )

The film like shots (again to my mind - others might disagree) might look something like these examples below assuming I can pull it off. It is not always the case that I can pull it off however, as some images just resist this kind of treatment. In short, I think these all have a degree of film like "look" to them but I have to say I seldom see any camera / lens combo (including Fuji cameras - despite the advertising) can turn out such images without post processing.

On a street corner by Life in Shadows, on Flickr

Rainy day in the park by Life in Shadows, on Flickr

And the last one which I like for its colors and tones though I missed focus a little.

Back of House by Life in Shadows, on Flickr

 

[peterm1]

One thing for starters, a digital photograph may appear to have a film-like quality when the tonal mapping in the digital print correlates with what one expects from the tonal relationships between light and shadow in a film print. Getting the tonal balances and transitions right takes a good eye, and skill.

I think this is right Lynn. I spend a lot of time in post, adjusting colors and tonal values in images to get something that I really like - and most often this means "film-like" (at least as I interpret that term). One thing I regularly do is to adjust the relationships between light and shadow. I try to adjust the shadow "roll-off" into lighter mid tone areas, for example, so there are few harsh transitions and pretty much the same for highlights. This can also involve me adding some filters that mimic halation found in film (the filters do not advertise themselves as doing so - this is my interpretation). It also involves me slightly softening very sharp digital images to get a still sharp, but slightly more mellow image that better matches film. Another thing I find myself doing is to try to enhance shadows to ensure they play a role in how the image looks. For example, in the park scene included in my other post above, I am pretty sure I increased the depth of the shadows in the upper right of the tree as I felt this added "dimensionality" to the image. Flat lighting in general may suit (say) product photography but does not allow a more artistic interpretation demanded by some types of image making. The same kind of thing might be said for the young chef in the last image I posted. There were some minor shadows falling on her face and I made sure they remained as they create a more natural looking result due to the "modelling effect" on her face due to the way it emphasizes its shape and contours. I do not know why this kind of processing approach adds to a "film like" look but I, at least think it does.

Depending on the image, all of this can take hours of experimenting sometimes (and several attempts) but it's something I do not mind doing as I enjoy the creative effort and the "psychic salary" earned from getting a result I like. I have not found it to be possible to get such effects straight from camera though using vintage lenses do help to some extent.

 

[Rob-F]

D

But there's no need to emulate because you can use traditional chromogenic silver halide (i.e. "C type") paper and chemicals with digital images projected by laser. I guess the range of paper today is mire limited, but still...

In fact, C type prints are cheaper than inkjet prints from labs.

All my exhibition prints are C types because I think they look better: the image sits in silver prints rather than on the surface as with inkjet prints, so it's kind of like looking into the picture instead of at a surface that abruptly stops - if that makes sense!

Yes that does make sense to me.

 

[Rob-F]

I will take a guess and say the first image is film.

That was my impression as well.

 

[Godfrey]

A minor thought: No simulation or emulation has ever captured the look of a good Polaroid SX70 or 600 print credibly. Some are close, and good in their own right, but none look the same.

G

 

[Pál_K]

...
Can you tell me which image is film and which is digital?

After looking at that, I can tell you...



...that image is not real!!!

 

[peterm1]

I think that posts asking people to identify which photo is digital and which is film miss the point a bit. I mentioned above that I usually process my photos and often, in my case this will end up resulting in a final image that I think has a "film like" quality to it - at least in my interpretation. But I definitely do not do this specifically because I want to make the image look like film per se. I just want a result that I like as an expression of an artistic interpretation. It just so happens that this is often something that looks a bit "filmy" if I can call it that. I really do not much care if people think it was shot on film or not. I just want an image that excites me visually. In fact, if truth be told, 99% of images I ever took with film were pretty boring. Why? Well because I did not have access to a dark room and so could not bring them to their full potential. With digital I can at least try to, as "Lightroom" is my "darkroom" and all I have to do is use it to the best of my abilities. This is a large part of the reason I eventually gave up "real" film (apart from the cost aspect") as digital gave me more latitude to create.

The following is another image that I think looks a bit "filmy". But my real interest in it is not this, but rather that I think it has some pleasant colors and tones that somehow or other work together in harmony with each other.

Beer O'Clock in the City by Life in Shadows, on Flickr

 

[Bill Blackwell]

The top one seems like film to me.

However, such comparisons are difficult because the film is being scanned - so we're still seeing two digital images. Likewise, printing a digital image to compare with a film print isn't quite right either.

It's not so hard - even with these examples. IIRC, the film was Ilford FP4. I only chose these two images because they were the same subject taken at almost the same spot. The digital image captured far more detail on the concrete surfaces. IMHO, the (2nd) digital image is far superior with better tones and higher contrast without sacrificing detail.

I believe your observation about scanning is a valid one, but there is no other way to post film images on forums such as this. The original scan is a high resolution TIF file (64 megabytes) - then converted to JPG.

 

[joe bosak]

Some of the things that make me think something looks film-like:
- b&w with grain like old newspaper photos
- b&w that looks like stills from old silent movies (lack of some colour sensitivity maybe)
- sometimes incorrect colours that remind me of getting family snap prints done in the 80s and 90s (that T shirt was purple ot blue!)
- sometimes where the colours are weirdly off but somehow beautiful
- sometimes where the colour and maybe DR from early-ish digital cameras

 

[pvdhaar]

- b&w with grain like old newspaper photos

That was actually not grain.

Newspapers used rastering to print images. It's basically a fixed grid of black dots, where the size of the dots corresponds to where it lies on the grey-scale. It's different from grain, where instead the number of grains that have been hit by photons reflects exposure.

 

[jsrockit]

In my opinion "filmlike" means the absence of typically failures like oversharpening, blown highlights etc.
in a picture. But its a term more from the beginning of digital photography times I think.

Well, believe me, film photography can be done really badly as well. I do not think it is fair to blame a photographer´s shortcomings on a medium as a whole.

 

[Axel]

Nothing to blame here John.